Our approach
All our workshops and classes are centred around the ‘bodily writing’ method, inspired by Stéphane Mallarmé’s ‘ecriture corporelle’, which literally translates as ‘body writing’. Dancers explore the musicality and physicality of the words, text, and voice through the body, and how these responses might inspire new modes of movement and choreography.
Poetry and Dance, Choreography workshop at the University of Birmingham.
We love to think outside the box, experimenting with our bodies, voices, and pushing exciting new creative boundaries. We build poems, and take them apart; illustrate words, and become their sounds. We read and write poems, dance, and explore ours and others responses, to the the turn of a hand, a look, or a written phrase.
Bodily Writing workshops are a fantastic route to developing new artistic or creative work: whether introducing poetry into the classroom; exploring use of voice and movement for a play, or a new choreography. We encourage play and inventiveness, and with exploring new worlds from new perspectives, a key emotional tool: empathy.
Translation
We believe there is a marked difference between presenting dance and poetry ‘alongside’ one another, to actually integrating the two. Voice and text have long been used to prompt and enrich the arena of dance, either in performance or practice. But defining a process where one becomes the other, is a very different thing!
We are particularly interested in collaborative exploration into the ways that words, voice, and text can be translated into movement, and are currently undergoing practical research into truly workable, and applicable methods of translating poetry into dance. Many of our workshops to date have been geared around unpicking this method.
To date we have delivered masterclasses in poetry-based choreography and movement exploration for the University of Birmingham, Wolverhampton University, The Southbank Centre and Poetry International, BIDF, N.A.W.E (Skills and Sharing Symposium, the Birmingham Weekender Festival, and The Arena Theatre.
